


Like the First Time and Yet

by rodeoclown



Category: Person of Interest (TV)
Genre: Episode Tag, Established Relationship, M/M, Season/Series 04
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-13
Updated: 2015-03-13
Packaged: 2018-03-17 07:04:19
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,878
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3519902
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rodeoclown/pseuds/rodeoclown
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When everything had changed, he realized how nothing had. Coda to 4x01.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Like the First Time and Yet

**Author's Note:**

> A short interlude set between Episodes 4x01 (Panopticon) and 4x02 (Nautilus). Spoilers up through those episodes. Possibly out of compliance with canon afterwards as I haven't caught up with the rest of Season 4 yet. Warning for brief mention of suicidal thoughts.

John couldn't say that he had ever had much sense of home. Growing up a military kid, his father far away in Vietnam, and his mother shuffling him between the homes of friends while she juggled two separate jobs trying to pay for all the necessities that went uncovered by the army's paycheck, hadn't been conducive to it. Even when his father had finally been discharged, his return was so short lived, that to call the town where he died and where John had graduated high school a "home" was a stretch.

It had been a fool's errand probably, given his father's track record, to have gone searching for a home in the military, but then he hadn't had much choice in the matter. Once the CIA got a hold of him, he would have said there was definitely no chance of him finding one. Every new assignment had meant a new foreign city, and a growing sense of alienation and detachment, first from the missions they were asked to carry out and then finally even from himself.

On bad days, John would wonder if he had given all that up earlier, he could have found a home with Jessica, but John felt that if The Machine had happened to calculate the probability of that happy ending, it would not have been high. The problem lay deeper inside him than just a career choice.

And John had certainly never felt at peace, unless the alcohol fueled numbness of his suicide plans (before Harold had found him and proposed their grand post mortem venture) had granted something close to it. No, he knew now that _that_ had not been peace.

Strangely enough, when peace finally came to John, it was only after he had found a home and then lost it. A home cobbled together out of the remains of both his and Harold's lives and what they could salvage of the lives of others, all held fragilely in place by the tape and pushpins and strings that held each photograph and piece of data on Harold's boards. As if, by connecting all of the irrelevant numbers, all of us, one might arrive at The Truth. And was that Truth, or collective truths, even a shelter? Were they being foolish, all over again, to believe it to be one? For ironically, it was only after the glass board had been destroyed, knocked to the ground and smashed into tiny pieces by one of Decima's operatives, and after they had both been scattered like those pieces into the new lives of strangers, John Reese to become Detective John Riley and Harold Finch to become Professor Harold Whistler, that John had finally felt secure.

It was, as if, when everything had changed, he realized how nothing had. And the fear of losing what was between them, as he had, through his own devices, lost everything else in his life, evaporated. Even Harold's own insecurity, usually so tightly tamped down, finally let loose, did nothing to dampen his growing sense of its stability. Perhaps their positions reversed, and John being called upon to be the rock this time, had reinforced its girders.

Harold had sent a text that afternoon. It was the first time he had broken his self imposed radio silence. At their last meeting John had tried to impress to Harold that even if their physical home was destroyed, it was them, all of them who were left: He and Harold, Shaw, Fusco, and on a good day he might even include Root, continuing to work together to save people that created their home. But Finch was convinced that it was imprudent and dangerous, and trying to persuade Finch otherwise when he had his mind made up felt a bit like trying to catch one of his feathered namesakes. It was best to scatter the bread crumbs and walk away for awhile, give him a safe distance to approach and consider the problem rather than to force a solution. There was no use pushing your luck (as he was sometimes want to do) trying to get the bird to eat out of your hand. That Finch had taken the phone he had offered at all was a miracle, possibly further proof of just how rattled he was. John had not been expecting him to use it.

After his initial surprise at the text had worn off, his next reaction had been to suppose that something bad had happened. But Harold's text, like The Machine's own, was concise and inscrutable, containing only an address and a time later that evening. The address directed him to a restaurant near a university district where John presumed Harold now worked. Or perhaps the text wasn't from Harold at all, but The Machine. Perhaps it was attempting to match make, to use the uncanny way their skills and talents and neuroses fit together for its own aims. If those ultimate aims were for good or bad, John hadn't decided yet.

Then, an hour later, a second text arrived: _Meeting running late. Can we make it 20:00?_

John had texted back. _No problem._

A few more minutes had passed, and then a third text had arrived, containing a new address, one that could be traced to a residential block not a five minutes walk away from the original restaurant. John raised one eyebrow when he discovered that. Perhaps Finch wasn't so rattled. Or perhaps he was still the biggest enigma of all.

But what was left of the old old John (it was becoming difficult to count at this point the different people who had taken that name) liked enigmas, just as he liked a challenge. And so, at precisely the specified time, he found himself standing on the porch of an unassuming brownstone, his eyes sweeping over the windows and the alley to his right. Mentally calculating escape routes and possible security threats before he raised his fist to tentatively give a knock. 

The door opened promptly and Finch appeared behind it, looking for all the world not like the professor he'd sat next to in the park, but, John thought, like one of those heroes in a televised version of a Jane Austen novel (not that he had watched many of them), and greeting him with a polite formality. 

"Detective--John, what a pleasant surprise, do come in."

The return to the normalcy of something approaching Harold's old working persona was reassuring. If their meeting had been The Machine's arrangement, he would have seemed genuinely shocked. And if they were in any serious imminent trouble, his greeting would have been much more clipped and on point. John's lips turned up slightly in amusement as he took a step inside the cramped foyer, shrugging off his black leather jacket (even if he had returned to the numbers he hadn't yet returned to wearing a suit--it just hadn't seemed right somehow) and hanging it on the post that stood next to the door.

As he did so, Bear pushed himself into the space between them and refused to follow Harold's commands to retreat to his bed until John had dropped to his knees and given his ears a thorough scratching. Standing back up, he took a step forward into Harold's personal orbit for the first time in weeks.

"The pleasure's all mine, _Professor_. But I must ask what I owe it to."

Harold merely looked back at him nonplussed through his glasses, as if teasing had not been the desired direction he intended the conversation to head. So there _was_ something urgent he wanted to discuss.

John schooled his features, "Finch, are you alright?" he asked.

"Yes, Yes. I'm fine. The meeting went late, they were discussing the issue of Dr. Eastwood's tenure, and apparently she's managed to make quite a few enemies in the department so there was much to discuss." He paused in his rambling to smile softly to himself. "Hopefully not the kind of enemies that would put her on your list but--I don't know if you've had a chance to eat yet, but I took the liberty of ordering Indian for us."

As he finished his monologue, he started walking towards the dining room, where two place settings had been impeccably set out. Only his slightly more pronounced limp as he did so betrayed that he was under any more strain than usual. When he had reached the table, he turned back towards John.

"About that list--" John began, but was cut off.

"I'm not going to continue helping you with that, as I've said. But... But I wondered if we still might, that is, unlike your current life saving activities--of which I still very much disapprove by the way--I don't think it would call attention if we... that is to say, I've calculated the potential risks and concluded..."

Finch's voice trailed off. He raised his eyes to meet John's across the room, a certain desperation in them peeking through the cracks in the formality of his speech. If Harold's words had caused a thousand flirtatious comments to spring already formed into his mind, that unspoken desperation just as quickly silenced them. 

John suddenly had a vision of both of them standing in a different room on a different evening and Harold looking up at him with the same pleading on his face. There had been the cold feeling of the butt of a gun in his hands. And a steely determination to do whatever he needed to do for Harold, or whatever, in the end it turned out, Harold wanted him to do. If Harold's glass board was still standing, one might draw a line of string between the desperation in Harold's eyes then and the desperation in them now.

But the glass board was no more and there was no gun in his hand tonight. It was stashed inside his jacket that hung next to the door, left there after he had ascertained the absence of an immediate threat. Like his newest life, the room abruptly felt to John like a cover of its own, a shadow keeping them safe from the mind of the world. Somewhere free from the higher purpose their love might serve on another day.

And yet--and yet in the rays of the porch light that shone onto the floor between them as their eyes met, it still stood on its own. Love devoid of any god. Or, he amended, if the highest God _was_ Love, maybe the title fit. God devoid of Purpose, then. As She existed on the first day, before the act of Creation and before any apples had been consumed.

John wasn't running this time. He wasn't trying to find a place to hide. (Though maybe Finch did need one of those for a while. Maybe he could give him that.) He wasn't looking for a purpose or for absolution from his sins. There was no bomb strapped to his chest, metaphorically or otherwise, that needed defusing. And, although the sensation was startling, he had not just been shot.

At that moment, John did not need salvation, nor was it being offered to him.

And still he crossed the floor and fell peacefully into Harold's arms.

**Author's Note:**

> This is the first fic I've managed to finish, somehow the idea of Harold and John as still-an-entity in the brief moment it existed without the heavy layer of their working relationship caught hold of me and made me want to write something.


End file.
